ANDREW GARFIELD
“I LOVE MOVIE STARS. I LOVE THE ROCK. I LOVE TOM CRUISE. I’M JUST SAYING THAT IT’S NOT FOR ME...”
In 2008, Andrew Garfield won an acting Bafta for his debut feature Boy A, playing a rehabilitated child murderer who is trying to escape the shadow of his ghastly formative years. Given the storyline’s similarities to the James Bulger case, Garfield became something of a name, and two years later attained a whole new level of fame by starring in sci-fi drama Never Let Me Go and David Fincher’s birth-of-Facebook masterpiece, The Social Network.
It’s hard to believe, then, that Garfield has, to date, only appeared in a dozen films – or 15 if you count the Red Riding trilogy, which debuted on Channel 4. But all that’s about to change as he has not one, not two, but three movies queuing up to hit our screens, with social-media satire Mainstream soon to be followed by a pair of biopics: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical drama tick, tick...BOOM!, based on the creative struggles of Rent creator Jonathan Larson, and The Eyes Of Tammy Faye, charting the rise and fall of televangelist couple Tammy and Jim Bakker (Jessica Chastain and Garfield).
Total Film was sent all three movies by Garfield’s agent the evening before the interview, so we kick things off on Zoom by explaining that a Garfield triple bill went down the night before. “Jesus Christ!” exclaims the 38-year-old actor, who’s nestled next to a pot plant in his temporary digs in Calgary, where he’s shooting Mormon crime drama miniseries Under The Banner Of Heaven for FX. Yep, says TF, three years of Garfield’s life has just been squeezed into six hours. “Wow,” he sighs. “You can reduce a life to that. That’s crazy.”
Crazy is as good a word as any to describe both Garfield’s rapid ascent and the level of commitment he brings to each role. No sooner had he graduated from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama than he was winning various Most Promising/Outstanding Newcomer awards for his stage work, and he made his television debut in Channel 4 teen drama in 2005. The next breakthrough came in 2007, when he appeared in two episodes of starred in both and Robert Redford’s war-on-terror drama and was named one of ’s ‘10 Actors
